Chez Robert Giron

Gival Press announced that George Klawitter of Notre Dame, Indiana has won the 19th Annual Oscar Wilde Award-2020 for his poem titled Twenty. Michael Rodman last year’s winner served as the judge, who read the entrees anonymously.

George Klawitter received a cash prize of $500.00 and his poem is published at Gival Press websites.

About the Author

George Klawitter, retired professor of English (St. Edward’s University), has edited the poetry of Richard Barnfield and published The Enigmatic Narrator, a study of John Donne’s poetry. His poems have been printed in various journals including The James White Review, Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, Evergreen Chronicles, Milkweed, and Cumberland Poetry Review. His first book of poetry, Country Matters, appeared in 2001. His book Let Orpheus Take Your Hand won the Gival Press Poetry Award in 2002. His book of poetry The Agony of Words appeared in 2004, and his book of poetry Gareth came out in 2014. A volume of sonnets (The Priest) will appear in late summer 2020.

Winner of the 19th Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award-2020

Twenty

As a doctor, he’ll know the secrets
of the heart: when it skips a beat
he’ll sense the truths of chemistry, he’ll chart
the rise and fall of close encountering.

I saw him once, a man of no regrets,
take poetry, dissect it clean and neat,
squeeze metaphor, take simile apart,
then smile in simple pride, a flowering.

He’s rather like a daffodil in snow,
caught between reality and promise:
he dances in the cold of wild dreams.

My only luck is to watch him grow,
pentameter at hand, a sweet surprise
jetéd into my life of ifs and seems.

Copyright © 2020 by George Klawitter.


Finalists

Marsha P. Johnson Is Arrested for the One-Hundred-and-First, and Last, Time
by Arnaldo Batista of Dania, Florida.

When I Realized I Was a Green Tree Frog in Another Life
by Grant Chemidlin of Los Angeles, California.

Acetate Love
by Natasha Dennerstain of Oakland, California.

Love Potion #9 (Revisited)
by Octavio Gonzalez of Wellesley, Massachusetts.

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In Paula Goldman’s Late Love: poems we relive the passage of time that is so eloquently laid out for us in her poems of love and quotidian tasks that in writing about them they have been transferred into crystal balls of unlimited beauty and self-discovery from the husband who accidently leaves “poems on top of the car / before driving off” only for the poems to fly about in the wind to the loves of scents that bring to us all past memories. But then comes the day that we realize that with all memories we must let go while keeping the essence but not allowing it to control our senses.

In Late Love we learn of the meaning of love as a soldier from a marathon comes home “limping from a wound—/ [his] Achilles’ heel smarts.” Yet with “I take you / in my arms and we begin / the day to day battle, the terrible / grinding of years . . . I still love you. What are days for?" Here it’s as if the blossom of love on the cherry tree passes, but even on a nearly passed over for dead, the cherry tree blooms again, and its fragrance is yet as pungent and sweet with the passage of time.

In this collection we also experience the love of writing as recalled in “You Drew a Blank.” One waits for the muse “to leave myths of goddesses” for one “to spread outdoors.” The fear of not being able to write is the curse of any poet or writer, but Goldman finds topics to paint with words that come from her experience and imagination in art as in “Van Gogh’s Prayer”:

    Leave my heart, black crows,
    let me be free, or are they coming,
    their cawing calls, to rescue me?


But the loves that the title of this collection celebrates and invokes also point to loss:

                 … knowing
    I’d survived. But since you died,
    Mom, each loss carves a deeper

    hollow. Waiting for you
    to come home from our bloody

    butcher shop, carrying
    the wax-papered wrapped meat,

    how we ate, how we thrived. How
    the blood flowed into our lives.


Yet graciously in Late Love Goldman, who shares so much with us, leaves us with the essence of life:

    The two of us here under the covers
    And I know we have another day of light.
    To see the light, one has to see the dark.


Having read these poems in these days of plague and uncertainty, I’d say that Goldman nails life’s kernel of truth: Light.

Late Love: poems by Paula Goldman (Kelsay Books, 2020)

Photo: "Eye to Sea: Montevideo" Copyright © 2020 by Robert L. Giron.

Take a few minutes away from the trauma of the day and read some poetry. Visit & read the Poetry Month 2020 Special Bilingual (Spanish/English) Edition in ArLiJo Issue No. 135 edited by Luis Alberto Ambroggio. Featuring poets: Lucha Corpi, Raquel Salas Rivera, Naomi Ayala, Orlando Rossardi, Tina Escaja, Daisy Zamora, Isaac Goldemberg, and Luis Alberto Ambroggio.

Visit: www.ArLiJo.com

Art: "Prickly Pear" Copyright © Cass Graybeal Brown.

During this trying pandemic that has basically brought the world to a stand still, with hundreds of thousands sequestered in their homes, we would like our readers and followers to know that we value your lives and appreciate you, so please follow the guidelines issued by the CDC or your respective health agencies, so that we can all be healthier and hopefully survive this pandemic.
We would also like our authors who are located and reside in several continents to know that we value them and their work. We are committed to our mission and will continue to run our contests, publish books as well as continue our online journal, ArLiJo.
Stay safe and keep in touch,
Robert L. Giron
Publisher

Congratulations to Matthew Pennock has won the Gival Press Poetry Award for his collected titled The Miracle Machine. The collection was read and chosen anonymously by judge C.M. Mayo. The award has a cash prize of $1,000.00 and the collection will be published this fall.

“With a craftsman's deftest precision and a thunder-powered imagination on DaVinci wings, the author recreates a lost world within a lost world that yet—when we look—shimmers with life within our world. Elegant, wondrously strange, The Miracle Machine is at once an elegy and a celebration, tick-tock of the tao.
—C.M. Mayo, author of Meteor

About the Author
Matthew Pennock is the author of Sudden Dog (Alice James Books, 2012), which won the Kinereth-Gensler Award. As per the terms of that award, he joined the board of Alice James Books in 2011, In 2014, he co-created AJB’s editorial board with executive editor Carey Salerno, and then became the board’s first chairperson, a position he held until 2020. He received his MFA from Columbia University and his PhD from the University of Cincinnati. His poems have been widely published in such journals as Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, New York Quarterly, LIT, and elsewhere. He currently owns and operates a learning center outside of Washington, D.C.

Finalists
Death and His Lorca by Naomi Lowinsky of Pleasant Hill, California.
Judas Salt by John Blair of San Marcos, Texas.
Heavier than Sky by David Moolten of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
No Angels by Mary Makofske of Warwick, New York.

Gival Press is pleased to announce the winner of the 16th annual Gival Press Short Story Award-2019. Efímera by A. J. Rodriguez of Chicago, Illinois was chosen by last year’s winner Joan Goldsmith Gurfield. The author received a cash prize of $1K and the story is published on Gival Press’s website and its online journal, ArLiJo.

About the Author
A.J. Rodriguez was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but he currently resides in Chicago, Illinois. In 2018, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University with a dual major in English and Latinx Studies. During his time as an undergraduate, A.J.’s mentor and award-winning author Helena Viramontes helped him discover and develop his distinctly Burqueño voice. As illustrated in Efímera, A.J. articulates his prose through an intersectional Nuevo Mexicana/o/x milieu and aims to investigate how the individual makes sense of simultaneously occurring issues swimming within machismo, race, and family. His short story, Paloma en Fuego, was published in Chapter House Journal’s 2016 Spring Issue and was a finalist in the Epiphany Magazine 2016 short story competition. In 2020, A.J. plans to begin his Master of Fine Arts in fiction with the hope of completing and publishing his debut collection of short stories.

Click here to read the story Efímera

The Finalists
Slow Down This Time by Matthew Pitt of Ft. Worth, Texas.
A Question of Time by Rachel Hope Crossman of Berkeley, California.
Benediction by Margarite Landry of Southborough, Massachusetts.
Kuka--The Aztec Mother by Lupe Ruiz-Flores of San Antonio, Texas.